Long-Awaited Plan for Integrating Schools Proves Mostly Small-Bore

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Mayor Bill de Blasio and the schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, in February. On Tuesday, a principal critical of their new plan to increase diversity in public schools said, “It’s not a plan to integrate the schools.”

For months, New York City had promised to deliver what Mayor Bill de Blasio called a “bigger vision” for integrating the city’s racially divided public schools. Activists pressed their ideas. Students rallied on the steps of City Hall to demand a voice.

But when the plan landed on Tuesday, it was with a whimper. The mayor did not appear in public to talk about it. Neither did the schools chancellor. Instead, the city’s Education Department emailed out a news release, which did not even use the word “segregation.”

The release said the department was “committed to supporting learning environments that reflect the diversity of New York City” and laid out a dozen policies — many of them small-bore, some of them already in place — designed to increase diversity, which was defined as encompassing not only racial background but also traits like disability status and gender expression.

In perhaps its most concrete act, the department for the first time set specific goals for racial and economic integration, saying that over five years it wanted to increase by 50,000 the number of students attending schools that reflect the city’s racial demographics and to decrease by 10 percent the number of schools whose children were isolated at one end of the economic spectrum. The department also said it wanted more schools to serve representative numbers of students with disabilities and students who speak a language other than English at home.

It was not clear how the city would meet those goals. Besides the policy tweaks, the city’s plan called for forming what it called a School Diversity Advisory Group and encouraging community school districts to come up with their own diversity plans.

By some measures, New York City has one of the nation’s most racially segregated school systems. “I did expect something a little gutsier and a little more visionary,” said Shino Tanikawa, chairwoman of the diversity committee of the community education council for Manhattan’s District 2. “It just feels like some of those specific actions are just tinkering around the edges and not really addressing the bigger structural issue.”

Still, Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has studied district integration plans and advised some districts on them, praised the city for setting specific goals for integration. “What I find exciting about this new plan is that for the first time in history, New York City has committed to a set of targets for expanding the number of economically and racially integrated school environments,” he said.

He added, however, that he wished the city had adopted policies aimed at integrating its selective high schools, including specialized schools like Stuyvesant High School, as Chicago has.

Elementary schools are segregated largely because of housing segregation, but middle and high schools are segregated in part because many schools screen students based on grades and test scores.

The city, in its report, announced steps that it said would make middle and high school admissions fairer and produce greater diversity.

It said it would eliminate, by 2019, an admissions method known as limited unscreened, in which schools prioritize applicants who demonstrate interest by, say, attending an information session or an open house. Critics say this advantages students whose parents have the time and ability to take them to an open house. The city also said it would prevent middle schools from seeing how students ranked them on their applications and would increase access to screened schools for students with disabilities, students learning English and homeless students.

Matt Gonzales, director of the School Diversity Project at New York Appleseed, an advocacy organization, said he was pleased by the diversity goals the department set out, as well as the commitment to talking with local communities. But he said he found the specific policy proposals “concerning and disappointing.”

He noted that the city was not getting rid of screened schools that require certain test scores or a high grade point average. “It seems like the D.O.E. is kind of doubling down on maintenance of screened schools, which are going to ultimately create stratified education environments,” he said.

The department’s release said little about how it would address segregation in elementary schools, except by continuing to allow some schools to voluntarily set aside seats for low-income students and by considering diversity as a factor when the city has to redraw school zones.

“It’s not a plan to integrate the schools,” said Jill Bloomberg, the principal of Park Slope Collegiate, a middle and high school in Brooklyn. She has been a sharp critic of the Education Department on segregation and is currently being investigated by the department for Communist organizing.

She said integration would require more aggressive policies and could not rely on using choice as a lever. But, she said, “I think they’re worried that if they don’t use the public schools to create enclaves for middle-class families, that those families will pull out of public education.”

In an interview on Tuesday, the schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, said she believed that steps like putting middle and high school applications online and allowing private prekindergarten providers that contract with the city to set aside seats for low-income students would help. “I feel very strongly that this is really setting goals,” she said, adding, “There’s a lot more work ahead.”

The mayor did not comment on the plan on Tuesday. At an education event last month, he had seemed to lower expectations for it, saying, “We’re not going to put forward a plan that says we’re going to instantly wipe away 400 years of American history.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Diversity Plan Fails to Offer ‘Bigger Vision’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe